The Kitchn Archive: Nov 2017

It’d sure be nice if you could just say, “Alexa, do all the things for me,” right? While she can’t go to work for you or peel a bag of potatoes, Alexa can lend a helping hand with mostly everything in the home — especially in the kitchen. Here are 10 surprising ways you can put an Alexa-enabled device to work when your hands are deep in a homemade dough, or you’re chopping away for Sunday sauce. What does music have to do with kitchen tasks?

I can get behind a design trend just as fast as the next person. Exposed brick? Sliding barn doors? Reclaimed wood? Check, check, and check! I dream of a farmhouse sink and a subway tile backsplash and am about to do the all-open-shelving thing in our kitchen. But there’s one seemingly mandatory design decision that I have zero interest in making: adopting the open kitchen. In our 1890 home, the smallish kitchen is at the back of the house in a textbook-style late-Victorian floor plan.

You may already know that baking soda has many properties that make it an amazing cleaner, including the fact that it absorbs odors and is just slightly abrasive, so it can scrub delicate surfaces without scratching them. Plus, it’s inexpensive and probably already in your home, making it a good candidate for impromptu cleaning sessions when the mood strikes or you find yourself with a few minutes. We already ran a list of 10 things you can clean with baking soda. Here are 10 more things.

When you’re totally snooping on somebody’s shopping list, there’s no other word for it. You’re not being “curious” — you’re just being straight-up nosy. But I couldn’t help it. Left to my own devices for a minute while I was at my favorite local cocktail lounge in Louisville reporting on their new cocktail menu, I spied a scrap of paper.

Sometimes you read about these hacks on the internet, and while some part of you desperately wants to believe they’re real, there’s another part of you that is certain that it’s all a fabrication and will never work. This hack rang both of those bells for me. Here’s the premise: If you put a dryer sheet into the water while you’re soaking a scorched pan, the burnt bits will magically lift from the pan, no scrubbing required. Yeah, right, I thought.

It's five o'clock somewhere — and you need a gift for your drinking buddy!

It's actually possible to give a coffee-themed gift without going the obvious route.

Wrap up one of these presents and prepare to get even more sweets sent your way.

Whether you're buying for someone who's building a kitchen for the first time or for someone whose tools are in need of a serious upgrade, these items are essential to any kitchen.

Congratulations! You did that big pantry reorg — you tossed out the stuff that expired 10 years ago, got all your bins and storage containers neatly lined up, and added all your favorite Pinterest hacks to make the best possible use of your space. Well done! Now comes the hardest part: Keeping it that way! Here are a few tips to keep the space neat and tidy forever.

Don’t you love Thanksgiving? Your family’s traditions, the delicious food, hanging with your cousins in the rec room after the meal is over — you look forward to it every year. And your parents look forward to seeing you! No, they insist, you can’t help with the cooking. Setting the table? Thanks, but they did it early this morning while you were still in bed checking Facebook on your phone.

Whether you’ve got a leaky container or something spilled while you were making a sharp turn, spills are often part of the deal when you’re transporting your Thanksgiving contribution. If you’re lucky the item that spilled is something dry (like a basket of biscuits), but more likely we’re talking about cranberry sauce or gravy, tricky spills that are hard to pull up and can permanently stain your upholstery if you don’t act fast!